MATERA – SIMPOSIO Recipes, Stories & the Stone Memory of an Ancient Land This is not a typical Southern Italian cookbook. MATERA explores the city and its surrounding land through food as a language of survival, memory, and resistance. Here, cooking is not comfort or nostalgia, but a daily practice shaped by scarcity, devotion, and the endurance of those who lived carved into stone. Matera is approached not through spectacle or cinematic myth, but through kitchens, rituals, and gestures rooted in Lucania’s harsh geography and long silences. Recipes emerge from a world where women cooked with discipline and imagination, where food carried ethical weight, and where tradition was shaped by necessity rather than abundance. This book was shaped by immersion and observation—following instinct, listening to place, and then pursuing each trace as it opened into another, like a rabbit hole. A flatbread leads to a saint’s day, a legume dish to hunger and care, a dessert to folklore, feminism, and domestic resistance. MATERA is not : a rustic cookbook dressed as folklore - a touristic portrait of Southern Italy - a simplified collection of regional recipes It is a cultural monograph told through food, combining Lucanian recipes, essays, folklore, and lived observation. — Matera is a land where food has always been moral. Cooking meant feeding many with little, preserving dignity, and transmitting knowledge through repetition rather than words. The cuisine of Lucania reflects restraint, solidarity, and deep attention to season and place. This volume includes fully contextualized Lucanian recipes designed for home kitchens yet faithful to their original logic, accompanied by essays on folklore, women’s work, religious rituals, domestic spaces, and the political dimensions of everyday cooking. Recipes include lagane e ceci , strazzate , cicirata , and other local preparations, each presented as part of a broader cultural and ethical system rather than isolated instructions. Recipes function as cultural keys: each dish exists for a reason, in a specific place, within a specific social and historical framework. This book is for readers who love Italy but want to understand it beyond surface beauty; for slow travelers, cooks who read, and readers who cook. It is also for those with Italian heritage who seek to reconnect with Southern Italy through depth, context, and lived tradition rather than nostalgia. MATERA is part of SIMPOSIO , a collection of travel cookbooks dedicated to Italy. Each volume is autonomous, yet incomplete on its own—chapters of a larger journey through food, territory, and everyday life. A book to read, to cook from, and to keep. An invitation to listen to what stone, food, and silence still remember.